Poor Farm Cemetery Gets A Hand

A groundswell of community concern over an abandoned potter's field graveyard has prompted local officials to pledge continued upkeep of the small plot between Geneva and Batavia.

The old cemetery of the former Kane County Farm and Home (commonly called the Poor Farm) was a burial place for the indigent and homeless as well as some of the county's elderly residents.

The Poor Farm was opened in 1851 and operated until 1970. The last burial took place there in 1953, said Dick Shewalter, who circulated a petition that garnered nearly 1,000 signatures of local citizens requesting that government officials clean up the cemetery and restore some dignity to the burial place.

Shewalter said the sad state of the graveyard was brought to his attention by Tom Mair, a local historian.

"He wanted to generate some activity to get it restored," said Shewalter.

The plot, on Fabyan Parkway just east of the county jail, is under the jurisdiction of the Forest Preserve District. Cleanup of the site already has started as a project of the county's Community Restitution Service, utilizing people who have been sentenced to community service. That work is being supervised by the Sheriff's Department.

"I am really impressed with the work they have done in there already," said Jon Duerr, superintendent of the forest preserve, adding that the district plans to maintain the area after the initial cleanup. The goal is to give the plot a park-like setting, he said.

Identification of all the grave sites has been difficult, said Shewalter. Graves were marked with concrete columns, 3 inches in diameter, that sat flush with the ground and were numbered on the top. Some records were recently found in county offices that had information on 167 of the graves.

But Shewalter believes at least 500 other graves are not identified.

"The only sign of these graves is their impressions," he said. "You can look and there's sort of an informal row, sunken as much as 8 to 10 inches, because (the bodies) might have been buried only in blankets. In later years, they were buried in pine boxes, but those have long since decayed and that leaves a hollow depression in the ground, too."

The forest preserve is seeking the advice of a cemetery specialist to help determine what to do with the sunken graves, said Duerr.